Hacker News: zanderz

New comment by zanderz in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

zanderz — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:10:02 +0000

It was decent, we shipped one but switched to .net because of high dpi scaling issues IIRC

New comment by zanderz in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

zanderz — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:03:08 +0000

Part of the reason was that WinRT was aimed at tablets and other low power devices, where unrestricted Win32 API use could drain the battery too quickly. They were trying to put the genie back in the bottle to have more control in this new ecosystem, like Apple enjoyed on iPad, etc. Much of the weird signing and app store evaluation was to make sure your app used only the blessed APIs and wouldn't, for example, stay awake in the background listening on an arbitrary port and drain the little tablet battery.

Painful and nonsensical from a desktop standpoint but also kind of impressive in a way.

New comment by zanderz in "Launch HN: Voltair (YC W26) – Drone and charging network for power utilities"

zanderz — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 13:48:05 +0000

Yes, this was needed for civil engineering and city permits to replace a retaining wall that holds my driveway up and (hopefully!) keeps it from sliding onto my neighbors fancy expensive house. All licensed and by the book. Quotes from other surveyors were 2x and more.

That's cool to discover entire roads you didn't know about. I would be hoping to discover an ancient city, like they did in central and South America with lidar. Are you sure there aren't any? Look again!

New comment by zanderz in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

zanderz — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:41:54 +0000

Maybe they need to put a traffic circle at this intersection.

New comment by zanderz in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

zanderz — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:34:08 +0000

Not only that, if 2 people talk at once they can cancel each other out and neither can be heard by anyone else.

Much of aviation is still based on pre WWII tech and practices like this and people underestimate how slow and difficult it is to change. Many piston aircraft still run on leaded gas, for example, the last existing market for it in the US.

New comment by zanderz in "Launch HN: Voltair (YC W26) – Drone and charging network for power utilities"

zanderz — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:11:30 +0000

I got a survey of my residential property, 1/2 acre on a rugged hillside, from a guy who used a drone equipped with lidar. It was $4,000, less than traditional methods, but it would be cool if a drone could just be dispatched from a nearby power pole instead.

New comment by zanderz in "Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston"

zanderz — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:36:05 +0000

For anything more complex than a shower head, a made in USA label often implies some trickery with final assembly of imported components, like the crossfire example above. Researching the supply chain for every single purchase is too tedious and exhausting for many of us otherwise willing to vote with our wallets.

New comment by zanderz in "Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi"

zanderz — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 16:03:14 +0000

I learned on here that this has been happening to a degree with maps. Several big companies have been cooperating to improve open street map data, a rare example of a beneficial commons. This is probably some unique accident of incentives and timing and history but maybe it could happen in other domains.

New comment by zanderz in "PG&E outages in S.F. leave 130k without electricity"

zanderz — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 07:44:25 +0000

It was a major reason Grey Davis was recalled and we got the Governator

New comment by zanderz in "Backing up Spotify"

zanderz — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 01:07:54 +0000

The person who wrote this Spotify p2p software also wrote uTorrent, which was bought by the company bittorrent after they struggled to make a C++ client on their own. The original bittorrent implimentation was in python, but they re-skinned uTorrent as bittorrent and shipped both for a few years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Strigeus

New comment by zanderz in "Fake job seekers are flooding US companies that are hiring for remote positions"

zanderz — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 14:01:55 +0000

Ha, yes, agree. How many trips to the office should it take to prove you are real meat?

New comment by zanderz in "How the lemon was invented (2018)"

zanderz — Fri, 26 May 2023 18:15:16 +0000

The name "grapefruit" always seemed a little puzzling when compared with grapes, and it seems nobody is quite sure how the name got started, only that it is from Barbados. One interesting theory is that it is named after the "sea grape", the only kind that grew in that time and place, which has a bitter taste.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/grapefruit-history-and...

New comment by zanderz in "English in the Real World"

zanderz — Wed, 24 May 2023 14:43:14 +0000

Prescriptivist in the streets, descriptivist in the sheets!

New comment by zanderz in "Tech companies keep falling for the forever fallacy"

zanderz — Wed, 24 May 2023 14:06:02 +0000

Agree. Hindsight is 20/20. A conservative CEO who pulls back and doesn't lean into a growth cycle will be criticized even more for leaving money on the table.

Whether the entire economy should be structured to incenivize all this instability is a separate question. Don't hate the player, hate the game!

New comment by zanderz in "The Anti-Productivity Manifesto"

zanderz — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 11:24:18 +0000

Some consider the emphasis on hard work and striving for its own sake to be less a default or inevitable value as an arbitrary confluence of history and Protestant/Calvinist doctrine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

One of Max Weber's theories is that working ever harder for more material gain once basic needs are met is not a universal part of human nature but more a cultural artifact of a certain time and place.

Not a message usually impressed upon us these days.

New comment by zanderz in "Did the Music Business Just Kill the Vinyl Revival?"

zanderz — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 13:43:45 +0000

"In other words, the record business became the only entertainment industry in the world with no plan for technological innovation."

Hasn't this been true since people started listening to the radio instead of buying sheet music? Who can be surprised at the cluelessness and intransigence of the music industry after 100+ years of the same? They were so busy fighting digital music, seemingly with the ridiculous pretense they could stop it altogether, they let spotify come in and take a big piece of the pie they could have kept for themselves.

New comment by zanderz in "90s VR Sainsbury's [video]"

zanderz — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 20:38:03 +0000

slogging across that giant parking lot doesn't help...

New comment by zanderz in "Man sells 3D-printed firearms to a buyback program for $21,000"

zanderz — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 20:15:31 +0000

A shoulder mounted anti-tank rocket was once turned over at a gun buyback in San Francisco: https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-gun-buyback-bazooka-guns/... I think it is probably worth a lot of taxpayer money to get that off the streets. More broadly, without wading into 2nd amendment arguments and just viewed as a public health issue, it seems possible that fewer guns in the general population equals fewer gun deaths. Whether these buybacks make any dent at all is a different question - one that would likely be easier to answer if political pressure hadn't halted government studies of gun safety https://www.npr.org/2018/04/05/599773911/how-the-nra-worked-...

New comment by zanderz in "The Pound's Warning for Europe"

zanderz — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 17:28:45 +0000

Some have argued in the past that a large part of the economy is money laundering for Russian oligarchs - hence the pejorative "Londongrad" nickname. Might a slowdown of this activity be affecting the economy as well?

New comment by zanderz in "Daily 'Breath Training' can work as well as Meds to reduce high blood pressure"

zanderz — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 08:46:13 +0000

"...those reductions are about what could be expected with conventional aerobic exercise..."

"It could be beneficial for people who are unable to do traditional aerobic exercise ..."

Title seems a little misleading